The politics of global value chains: : import-dependent firms and EU–Asia trade agreements

In 2006, the European Commission released its Global Europe Communication, in which it announced a shift from a multilateral to a bilateral trade strategy. One of the key pillars of this new strategy was to strengthen the bilateral trade relations with key Asian countries. In contrast to existing analyses that focus on European Union (EU) decision-makers’ agency, we propose an explanation for this notable shift in the EU's trade policy that stresses the political role of import-dependent firms. In light of the increasing integration of such firms into global value chains, the article argues that a plausible case can be made, both theoretically and empirically, that import-dependent firms had a clear stake in the signing of preferential trade agreements between the EU and Asian countries and that their lobbying efforts significantly affected the EU's decision to start negotiations on such agreements with South Korea, India and Vietnam

Flexicurity: a conceptual critique

In recent years 'flexicurity' has become an influential concept in academic and political discourse, in particular since the European Commission placed it at the core of the European Employment Strategy. However, both as an academic concept and as a policy concept flexicurity is underdeveloped and suffers from a number of serious shortcomings. In this paper we critically review the flexicurity concept and discuss a number of its problematic features. In particular, we focus on four aspects: the concept’s ambiguity and openness to political capture; its failure to problematise the creation of institutional complementarities; its lack of attention to conflicts of interest and to the heterogeneity of the labour market; and its reductionist view of the sources of flexibility and security. We illustrate this discussion with a series of empirical examples. Finally, we conclude that the flexicurity approach should or be abandoned, or substantially improved. We also provide a number of suggestions on how to strengthen the flexicurity approach